The Cost Of Running Compiz

[kraftman]

Hello,
Sad to see of performance angry compiz is.

I really would like to see a test with kwin.
And a comparative test between gnome and kde for playing games.
The should also report the problems encounter in each platform.

Best regards.

The most meaningful comparison between KDE vs Gnome (Kubuntu vs Ubuntu in this case) will be with sound enabled, because Ubuntu is using PulseAudio and this consumes some of the CPU power, so Kubuntu should be faster in games. Kwin should disable compositions, but it seems it's not always working.

@Sacha

So where does this 40-50% performance drop come from in Ubuntu? I'm guessing you can't blame Ubuntu.

Nice catch. So it looks not only compiz is slowing Ubuntu down in games. Btw. treating Ubuntu as a 'primary' Linux OS is starting to be a shame imho. Not only they released with serious issues (which still aren't fixed), but it has also slower graphic. Personally, I can't wait for Fedora 13 final release which is looking to be the best Fedora release ever - beta is rock stable and very fast (KDE version).

@Eoxx

I know that KDE/Kubuntu users are a minority

In your dreams. ;>

[Eazy]

I only play one game and that is UT2004. I have always needed to turn of Compiz when playing as I am a bit finicky when it comes to smooth gaming. Manually disable Compiz is not very convenient, so I used a script for that.

#!/bin/bash

kwin --replace &
ut2004 ;
killall -s USR2 compiz.real
compiz --replace & 
exit 0

This will stop Compiz when you start UT2004 and start it again when you quit UT2004 automatically.

This script is for KDE so you would need to change "kwin" to "metacity" (and "UT2004" for a different game) if you use Gnome. It has been a long time since I used this script (used it when I used KDE3) so it might not work any longer.



Now I use KDE4 and I made this script:

#!/bin/bash

kwriteconfig --file kwinrc --group Compositing --key Enabled false
kwin --replace &
ut2004 $@ ;
kwriteconfig --file kwinrc --group Compositing --key Enabled true 
kwin --replace
exit 0

This script will probably only work for KDE4. Perhaps it would help somebody.

[V!NCENT]

Good test but...
I don't understand why you don't turn off Compiz when you play games

Because not everyone still has a computer from the stoneage...

I'd rather have a moderate graphics setting and a repsonsiveness and hassle free desktop environment. I am also not going to turn of 3G on my phone whenever I make a call to preserve battery life. How's a desktop computer any different?

PS: ow wait sarcasm

[curaga]

The behavior of fglrx is very interesting here. I see two possibilities for it:
- it's very much optimized for composited environments, texture_from_pixmap and all that
- it does equally bad under both, because there's about equivalent unnecessary operation in the direct case comparable to compositing overhead

First wouldn't make sense, as no enterprise distro runs compositing.
Second would be just plain bad.

Bridgman, can you shed some light?

[Apopas]

Nice catch. So it looks not only compiz is slowing Ubuntu down in games. Btw. treating Ubuntu as a 'primary' Linux OS is starting to be a shame imho. Not only they released with serious issues (which still aren't fixed), but it has also slower graphic. Personally, I can't wait for Fedora 13 final release which is looking to be the best Fedora release ever - beta is rock stable and very fast (KDE version)

The combination Ubuntu and NVidia sucks. It has been proved before. That's why I asked the crossplatform benchmarks to include and another Linux distro besides Ubuntu.

[brent]

Does it even make sense to include DRI1-based open source drivers in the benchmark? I think it doesn't!
DRI1 doesn't support compositing and simply draws directly to the screen, no matter what.

[droidhacker]

The "tests" are useless since they only look at stupid pointless games and other worthlessness.

I suspect that it won't have ANY measurable effect on any measurements of anything that is actually ***USEFUL***. By USEFUL, I mean things that REAL PEOPLE ACTUALLY DO, like WEB BROWSING and WORD PROCESSING.

[Zhick]

#!/bin/bash

kwriteconfig --file kwinrc --group Compositing --key Enabled false
kwin --replace &
ut2004 $@ ;
kwriteconfig --file kwinrc --group Compositing --key Enabled true 
kwin --replace
exit 0

This script will probably only work for KDE4. Perhaps it would help somebody.

Uhm how about Shift+Alt+F12?

[nanonyme]

Does it even make sense to include DRI1-based open source drivers in the benchmark? I think it doesn't!
DRI1 doesn't support compositing and simply draws directly to the screen, no matter what.

Yes it does because according to benchmark compositing is faster in DRI1 than DRI2.

[etnlWings]

Compiz makes my system a hell of a lot faster and more responsive but then, I don't do much gaming. It's downright annoying when I have to turn compositing off, or have to use unaccelerated compositing ala Xfwm4.